For a man who has sold 45 million records and performed to stadiums full of fans since the age of 17, Ronan Keating is surprisingly anxious about his latest venture.
Aged 43 he is releasing an album, Twenty Twenty, which will mark two decades in the music business as a solo artist, following the break-up of his massively successful band Boyzone.
It’s a compilation of reworked classics (Life Is A Rollercoaster and Loving Each Day) and some roaring new tracks. Friends from way back, such as fellow boy band survivor Robbie Williams, and those from more recent times, Ed Sheeran and Emeli Sandé, have collaborated.
For a man who has sold 45 million records and performed to stadiums full of fans since the age of 17, Ronan Keating (above) is surprisingly anxious about his latest venture
He should be sitting back in his seat with the smug grin of a man who knows he’s giving his audience exactly what they want. It is his 11th solo record, less of an album and more of a statement of his achievements to date. ‘God no,’ he says. ‘I don’t feel like that at all. I feel incredibly anxious. It’s taken a year to finish; I’ve agonised over every track and then you have something you are really proud of and you worry it’s going to flop.’
He pauses. ‘It’s massive insecurity. It goes with the job. Am I relevant? Does anyone want me any more?’
Keating leans back and laughs because he is fully aware he might be sounding, as he would say, ‘like a total eejit’. There’s a thin line between artistic vulnerability and taking yourself too seriously, as he knows to his cost.
We are sitting in a west London hotel. He is wearing a waistcoat over a T-shirt that shows off his bulked-up arms, the result of hours in the gym. He looks good: his dirty blond hair is expensively tousled, Beckham-style, and he has the pale golden skin of an extensively travelled man. Underneath it all, however, he is still the working-class son of a Dublin lorry driver and a hairdresser.
Keating has been famous for almost two-thirds of his life. He has had to deal with massive issues under the spotlight: the death of his mother from breast cancer in 1998; splitting up his band in 2000 to go solo; the shocking loss of bandmate Stephen Gately, who died in 2009 from a pulmonary oedema; the scandalous implosion of his choirboy image when he had an affair with a backing dancer; and his subsequent split from Yvonne, his first wife and the mother of his three eldest children, in 2010.
He cannot – and does not – complain of having had a rough ride. As with insecurity, having to deal publicly with grief, loss, shame and scandal goes with the territory.
As a teenager in a world-famous boy band, his introduction to celebrity was a baptism of fire. ‘Initially I would just drink,’ he says. ‘I’m Irish. That’s the culture. There were no cafes when I grew up, just pubs. On Sundays, after mass, my folks would go to the pub for a couple of drinks and me and my sister and brothers would be left in the car park with a ton of other kids who’d also been left there by their parents. We’d have a riot. A lot of life was focused around pubs, so I drank.’
After his mother Marie died, he started drinking a bottle of Jack Daniel’s a night until his then wife, Yvonne, pulled him out of it. ‘And then you get older. You learn to deal with your stresses and keep going.’
Keating’s new album is a compilation of reworked classics (Life Is A Rollercoaster and If Tomorrow Never Comes) and some roaring new tracks. Ed Sheeran collaborates on a song
Emeli Sandé also features on Keating’s new outing. The album will mark two decades in the music business as a solo artist for the former Boyzone star
Friends from way back, such as fellow boy band survivor Robbie Williams also make an appearance on the new record
Album insecurity aside, Keating is a happy man. He is worth around £20 million and has been married since 2015 to Australian-born TV producer Storm, who is due to give birth to a baby girl imminently. The couple already have a two-year-old son, Cooper, and he is also dad to Jack, 21, Missy, 19, and Ali, 14, from his first marriage.
‘Five kids,’ he says. ‘Like my mam and dad. When I was Jack’s age I was married and had him!’ Storm recently said in an interview that she would be booking him in for a vasectomy as their family was now complete. ‘I’m not having the snip,’ he laughs. ‘I don’t have the time – I’ve too much to do.’
Keating works constantly. Every morning he is up at 5am for his Magic radio show with Harriet Scott. The album comes after a 16-month Thank You & Goodnight world tour with Boyzone, which ended last October. A few hours after we meet, he heads to Indonesia for three days of promotion. Last week he flew to Australia (where he was a judge on the Australian X Factor) to take part in the mammoth Fire Fight charity concert to raise money for those affected by bush fires.
Every night – when he’s home – he insists on cooking for his kids. ‘It keeps me calm,’ he says. ‘I have a glass of wine and I like the methodical process of cooking.’
Keating’s album will sell because it is a good one. It will not, as he knows, compete with the likes of his mate Sheeran, who performed at his wedding and who plays guitar on his new version of When You Say Nothing At All, which he sings with American country star Alison Krauss. ‘It’s their time for the big gigs and the madness,’ he says. ‘I’ve had my time and now it’s different, but it’s an achievement just to be here.’
Ronan Keating with his second wife, Storm. He has been married to Australian-born TV producer Storm since 2015 and she is due to give birth to a baby girl imminently
His collaboration with Williams, The Big Goodbye, came about in particularly poignant circumstances. Williams wrote it after hearing of the death of Stephen Gately but did not tell Keating about it until a decade later. ‘When I listened to it I was in tears,’ says Keating. ‘It’s obviously very emotional. We changed it so it worked as a duet.’
Boyzone were the Irish Take That. Five Catholic working-class schoolboys – Keating, Shane Lynch, Stephen Gately, Mikey Graham and Keith Duffy – brought together by Louis Walsh, who masterminded their career. ‘We were unprepared, unbelievably naive and totally clueless in the early years,’ he recalls. When Walsh told Duffy he could be in the band but he wasn’t allowed to have a girlfriend, the confused teenager responded by saying: ‘I’ll have to say “no” then, Louis, because I can’t be gay.’ Keating bursts out laughing at the story.
We are very close but we fight. I remember once seeing a dustbin flying through the air backstage
Boyzone’s image was of five angelic choirboys. In reality they drank like navvies, fought like dogs and camped it up with Gately, whose homosexuality was initially a secret. After seven years, the band split amid rows, recriminations and Keating’s decision to go solo. They didn’t speak for years and the Gately’s death brought them back together. Keating ploughed on, bagging awards, number ones and pumping out best-selling albums. He also co-managed Westlife, with Walsh, an even bigger Irish boy band than Boyzone. Nevertheless, as a musician he felt unworthy. ‘I’d spent a lifetime in a band being told I was just this performer. You don’t feel like an artist, certainly not a musician. In the Nineties it was Britpop and pop bands. You knew your place. I don’t remember Oasis being rude because we had that Irish connection but Damon Albarn and Blur were rude. And you feel it really badly.’
In recent years he has started to believe in himself. ‘You start to realise you have proved yourself when you’ve been in the business 26 years,’ he says. Having the likes of Sheeran, Sandé, Williams and Shania Twain work with him on his album felt like an acknowledgment of his success.
He tells me about the GQ Awards in 2017: ‘Stormzy was there and he came running over and asked to take a selfie. Then I bumped into Liam Gallagher in the gents, we had a chat and he shook my hand. When Stormzy got his award, after he’d thanked everyone, he said, “This has been an amazing night – I even got a selfie with Ronan Keating!” Then Liam went up to get an award and said, “You might think you’re special Stormzy but I didn’t just get a selfie with Ronan Keating, I shook his hand.” Everyone in the industry was clapping and I felt accepted. It was a real moment for me.’
Ronan Keating with his first wife, Yvonne, on their wedding day in 1998. ‘We got married very young,’ he says
Keating has found his place, even though it is no longer on a celebrity pedestal. Being stripped of his good-boy status after a six-month affair with backing dancer Francine Cornell was, in many ways, a relief. He was never a saint. ‘None of us were,’ he says. ‘We are all human. Humans make mistakes.’ He and his ex-wife have a good relationship now and he is close to their three children. ‘We got married very young,’ he says quietly.
When Boyzone reformed for a final tour in 2018 he admits it was not without its issues. ‘Of course there were rows,’ he says. ‘We spent three years without speaking after Boyzone split, and then, when Stephen died, everything changed. We’re not mates, we are brothers. We are very close but we fight. Back in the day I remember seeing a dustbin flying through the air backstage, but I think one of the biggest rows we ever had was on this tour. We were in Japan. I was doing my vocal warm-ups 40 minutes before we were due on stage and suddenly everything kicked off. There was a moment where we nearly didn’t go on stage and that would have been it.’
He has ordered a vegetable omelette from the waiter. ‘No cheese, no mushrooms,’ he says. When the omelette arrives, he cuts into it and a stream of mushrooms slide out. Keating grins. ‘Life,’ he says. ‘You’ve got to laugh.’
‘Twenty Twenty’ is out on May 1